1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of secure electronic messaging, and in particular to icon or other indicator processing on a messaging client on a mobile communication device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Known secure messaging software clients, such as electronic mail (e-mail) software applications operating on desktop computer systems, represent the status of a secure message using a series of visual message indicators. These indicators include icon images, text strings, and/or a combination of both images and text.
When a secure e-mail message is displayed to the user, the state of the message is indicated to the user as a set of message indicators. For example, if the content of a message is covered by a digital signature, an indicator representing that the message is signed could appear at the top of the message body. As another example, if the content of the message is protected by an encryption mechanism, an indicator indicating that the message is encrypted could appear at the top of the message body.
Other examples of indicators used to convey information about the state of the message include but are not limited to: indicators representing the trust status or revocation status of the digital certificate whose corresponding private key is used to sign a digitally signed message; indicators representing the state of any digital certificates that are attached to the message; and indicators representing whether the sender of the message asked that a signed receipt be sent when the message is read by the recipient.
In one implementation of secure email processing, determining and displaying the image, text, and any other information applicable to indicator, requires considerable processing time. Many of the secure email encoding methods in current use are complicated. Furthermore, extraction of the required information from a particular encoded message in order to determine and to construct an applicable indicator can be time-consuming.